Develop - what's new from the Alpkit Design Team

Le Woomf

By alpjim | 02, Jul, 2007

A piece of foam is not very interesting in itself, it serves a practical purpose ensuring your safety and is best left that way. Fortunately there is more you can do with a shell so we stuck our necks out and made some red shells.

The first Phud was Tomato, then we introduced Tarmac but your appetite was insatiable so they were followed by Deepwater, Rocket and Jaffa. One mat in 5 colours. Woomf followed in the same vein, choice was good and the boulder fields were alive with colour.

Two years ago we thought we would have a bit of fun and introduced very limited edition Zebra and Giraffe Woomfs. They became known as the Blings and sold out quickly, but we never had enough material to continue producing them, anyway they would not have been half as unique if we had of! Since then we have been thinking how we can do something even more unique, and those of you with more time on your hands than you should have may have already seen our Mutts Nuts pad, bigger than Phud but more importantly a pad printed on demand via a digital printing process.

Make no mistake, it wasn't cheap and it took a few days but it proved the concept was feasible. The obvious next step was to increase the volume, get an idea of price per mat and the logistics of offering such a product to our customers. Such a tailored process would only be feasible if the mats were made and printed in the UK, the Woomf fitted that criteria and used less fabric so it was an ideal candidate for the trial.

The ultimate goal is to print your designs on our mats, we do not expect the mats to come in cheap, our initial estimates show that such a mat would work out about £100 - £120. There are several things we could do to manage the overall cost such as printing many designs in a batch, so to trial the concept we have put together an exclusive coLAB collection of Limited Edition Woomfs.